The April 24, 2017 issue of Publishers’ Weekly carries a review of my debut novel, Defiled. It is a privilege and an honor to be reviewed by the industry’s premier magazine and I am grateful. Relatively few books are accorded this honor.

I found the review to be accurate in both its praise and its criticism. As a debut author I am certainly feeling my way around a dark room hunting for a light switch. For example, the reviewer said, “… Nemeth writes well and knows how to build suspense …”. I’ll take that as high praise and encouragement to keep writing.  The reviewer also said that my characters could have more depth.  I’ll take that as constructive criticism.

Over the weekend I attended a writer’s workshop in Atlanta and was inspired by Chuck Sambuchino’s speeches (you know him as the editor of Writers’ Digest) and a meeting with Mark Gottlieb of Trident Media. These soirees are always the source of insightful information about the writing craft and the writing business. They also provide chicken soup for the writer’s soul as we socialize with hundreds of kindred souls struggling with an amazingly common set of publishing problems. We are not alone. In fact, like salmon swimming upstream to spawn, we are in an overcrowded marketplace and, like the salmon, most us will be eaten by “bears.”

I’ve read interviews with William Faulkner, Ernest Hemmingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe and as I’ve compared the questions those legends were asked to the questions I’m now asked by interviewers, I’ve become aware of the changes in readers’ tastes, and in the measures by which we judge “good writing”, and of the change in expectations when readers purchase fiction.

Ran across this quote from George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm):

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”

Ah, the Holidays, the season when our hearts overflow with goodwill toward our fellow man. Well, maybe some hearts have little capacity for joy.

The scene yesterday was the overflowing parking lot at a suburban Atlanta mall. Lines of cars waited impatiently for shoppers to empty spaces and make room for new arrivals. I was second in line behind a Beamer with its turn signal indicating an intention to take a soon-to-be-vacant spot near the head of the row. The exiting car moved slowly and awkwardly, avoiding contact with the Beamer that had left it too little room to maneuver. That mistake allowed a crafty woman approaching from the opposite direction to zip into the spot ahead of the Beamer.

Friends and family ask what I want for Christmas and I invariably tell them: books. Which books? Anything new by Joseph Kanon, Martin Cruz Smith, Robert Harris, Olen Steinhauer, Nelson DeMille or Michael Lewis, I tell them.  At the moment, Mr. Smith has a new title on bookshelves called The Girl from Venice. I expect to find it under my tree.

People often ask what books I would give as presents?  The novel that affected me more deeply than any other was No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.  I would recommend that tome any time.  The two novels that inspired me to become a writer were Boys and Girls Together by William Goldman and The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer.  If only I could write half as well.  Really anything by those gentlemen would make good reading.

Many newly published novels, perhaps even most of them, have easily recognizable heroes and villains. The heroes are all-powerful, all-avenging, pure-of-heart, upstanding citizens. The villains are easily recognizable as well–pure evil packaged in human form. No complex explanations are needed to justify the actions of either the heroes or the villains. The villains do evil because they are evil and the heroes do good because they are good.  The villains are sexual predators, serial killers, dictators bent on world domination. The heroes are … well you know who they are. They are the only persons in the world who can save the world from some looming disaster.

There are three questions I usually get asked in interviews that I particularly like and wanted to answer here in case readers don’t see the other interviews. These are the three most fundamental questions that can be asked about Defiled and provide readers with interesting (I hope) insight into the writing of the novel.

Writer’s Digest has just announced its 24th “Dear Lucky Agent” contest on its GLA (Guide to Literary Agents) blog. This is a free contest for writers of literary and upmarket fiction http://tinyurl.com/hmelhd3 judged by agent @AnnieAHwang, via @chucksambuchino.